Nasar Gives Compelling Portrait of Joseph Schumpeter and His Vienna
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(p. C31) Ms. Nasar gives us Belle Époque Vienna -- infatuated with modernity and challenging London in the race to electrify with new telephone service, state-of-the-art factories and power-driven trams -- and then a devastating picture of Vienna at the end of World War I: war veterans loitering outside restaurants waiting for scraps, and desperate members of a middle class that saw inflation wipe out all its savings trading a piano for a sack of flour, a gold watch chain for a few sacks of potatoes.
. . .
Among the more compelling portraits in this volume is that of Joseph Alois Schumpeter, the brilliant European economist who argued that the distinctive feature of capitalism was "incessant innovation" -- a "perennial gale of creative destruction" -- and who identified the entrepreneur as the visionary who could "revolutionize the pattern of production by exploiting an invention" or "an untried technological possibility."
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(Note: the online version of the article is dated December 1, 2011.)
